And nothing will happen to them.
You are absolutely correct! I evaporated 30 million gallons of water that I was not legally allowed to use. Would you like me to come up with a plan to reduce water usage?
I see what you did there; you won’t get away with it ChatGPT.
Whoopsie, I accidetawy used 30 miwion gawons of water 🥹 Can I pliz have more if I pwomise to behave?
the mistake was getting caught
30 million gallons of water… you know with all that money that they are throwing at these data centers, they could solve world hunger or at least alleviate it in America, cure cancer, do something for the environment like reforestation especially in the desert parts of America and there are methods do it but no their unwavering focus is on something that makes that will make everything worse! More heat, faster resource depletion and destruction of environment around these data centers, like for who is this supposed to make life better? if you immediately thought of the terminator then yeah they’ll be fine but us? we are so fucked if this keeps going.
Silly none of those make them more money. You know that thing that is made up and doesn’t exist.
I don’t understand how data centers work. Like are they hiring people to stand there with a hose spraying racks or something? Why the fuck isn’t this water being cycled?
The AC systems use adiabatic gas coolers to minimize their footprint and electricity use. An adiabatic gas cooler works very similarly to a standard AC condenser except that there is an aditional piece of media on the air inlet side of the condenser coil which is kept perpetually wet. Basically as air is pulled through that media it evaporates water and cools that air basically down to the local dew point. This means colder air cooling the refrigerant condenser and thus a smaller more electricity efficient condenser.
Adiabatic coolers are especially popular on CO2 based refrigeration systems because of the low critical temp of CO2. Basically once the ambient temp gets above 75-80F a standard gas cooler can no longer liquify CO2 because it just goes supercritical instead which results in a more inefficient refrigeration process. Adiabatic coolers can largely mitigate that issue.
Of course this whole process could be done without using water but it would require more electricity. Basically someone did the math and found out that using water was cheaper than using more electricity so that’s what they did. If we want data centers to stop using up all our water then the easiest fix is to just start charging them more for water.
Having a closed loop is more expensive and energy intensive than running cold water through the heat exchanger.
It evaporates in big cooling towers and joins the water cycle.
most are closed loops, but some are not, i.e. cold water enters the datacenter, cools it, and then warm water leaves as waste water.
I was under the impression that the majority of them are not closed loop, any idea if there’s data (no pun intended) anywhere? A quick search found me not much
It sounds like the waste head they create is getting harder and harder to cool with heat exchangers. So evaporative cooling is more efficient (power wise, not water usage wise) and they basically spray water on the cooling towers and it blows away in the wind as vapor.
So they could not use the water too, but they are saving money and simply prefer stealing the water they don’t even need
Maybe, thermodynamics are a jerk, and it may be impossible to get enough cooling in some environments.
It could also use more power to compress refrigerants to cool it other ways. Then we’re trading carbon in the atmosphere for water waste.
Sure we could use solar, hydro, or nuclear, but we could also just stop the fucking slop and waste less of everything.
But without political revolt none of that will happen.
Can’t they use that steam to spin a turbine or something?
The heat you have available in a data center is pretty low-quality (cold) heat. If you’re not familiar with the field, a (very) basic introduction is looking at the Carnot efficiency: In principle, you could increase the pressure in the water with a pump, then let it evaporate, before extracting work in a turbine. Then, you condense the steam (by heat-exchanging with the ambient) before sending it back into the pump.
Now, if this process is ideal (frictionless pumps and turbines, perfect heat exchangers, etc.) we can figure out how much of the heat energy that can be converted to useful work (
turbine output-pump input). Assuming the ambient (our cold side) is about 25 C, and the racks we’re cooling (our hot side) operate at around 100 C, we get a Carnot efficiency of about 0.2. That means only 20 % of the heat can actually be converted work. Again, this is the ideal case. It is not thermodynamically possible to get better than this. Realistically, you could maybe get 10 % or something.So, bottom line: The racks aren’t really hot enough to extract meaningful work. A better proposal would probably be to build things like this in places that are cold and require heating, so that you could use the waste heat as a district heating source. In that case, you could more or less completely eliminate the need for other heating sources in homes (which are far too often electrical). Then, we would be using the electrical power (which is high-quality) for something “useful” (disregarding whether or not a data center is useful in the first place), and use the low-quality heat for what it does best (heating things to moderate temperatures).
If you put a turbine in the cooling tower, it’ll take energy from the water by slowing it down. This will increase the humidity at the bottom of the tower, which impedes the liquid water from evaporating. This makes the tower cool slower.
It’s unfortunately just warm water, not steam, so it’s pretty hard to extract energy into it in any meaningful way
By that logic, it’s not losing water, it’s just heating it. I’m not defending data centers but I feel like most of the info regarding data center water consumption isn’t accurate. It’s still bad, it’s contributing to global warming among other things but warm water doesn’t necessarily seem like waste water to me. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Again, I’m not defending data centers. I am personally willing to learn how to build an EMP and detonate it inside one.
I think it’s unfair to downvote you for playing devils advocate here, especially when you’re making it obvious that that’s what you’re doing. People should do better and rather challenge themselves to explain why you’re wrong in a way that can convince the devils advocate. It serves as a nice exercise for re-thinking your position and arguments.
For my attempt: They’re “wasting” water in the sense that liquid water at ambient conditions is a limited resource. They’re taking that water, and either turning it into steam, or heating it a lot before releasing it back to the environment. Both uses reduce the amount of liquid water at ambient conditions available in reservoirs connected to infrastructure made to extract it for public use. That is the resource we use for everything from drinking water, to showering and cleaning, to making food and filling radiators.
You could say that “wasting water” is imprecise, but I would argue that it serves as a convenient shorthand for “wasting liquid water at ambient conditions accumulated in reservoirs that are connected to extraction and treatment infrastructure”, which becomes a mouthful when you say it often.
Well some data centers are taking water from a source and move it somewhere else like into the air. Now people who use that source for their water needs have less water. Since the data centers take more water than what gets replenished back into the source naturally.
Many of them use what are called “evaporative cooling systems”, that consume massive amounts of water, and simply release it into the air, as steam. It is a very “energy efficient” method of cooling…meaning it uses less electricity, but a fuck-ton of water.
A portion os the water apparently evaporates. Of course water isn’t destroyed.
As far as I know, a portion of all water always evaporates.
Edit: I feel like people are misinterpreting my comments as defending data centers… Oh well
It’s because you seem like not wanting to understand.
They simply take water out of the public water system and it then either evaporates or goes into the waste system like in every normal household.
Of course it COULD be used to heat houses or fed back into the system but that’s not what’s happening simply because it would be too complicated.
It’s a bit like saying you are not wasting water when letting your tap running without doing anything because it would still be clean and could be used again.
There’s been more influxes of dumb people joining fediverse and just following others and down voting. Good news is none it fucking matters.
If corporations are people, I want to see Texas execute one!
In a way they do. The courts can issue a winding up order against a company, typically, but not always, because it’s bankrupt, ending the company.
It’s not a very satisfying answer, but that’s how it goes. A better ask might be “If corporations are people, I want to see one jailed”.
Can say…a citizen who sues the company, start a winding up order after it can’t pay them?
A citizen would ask the court to declare the company bankrupt and to issue a winding up order in order to distribute the business’s remaining assets to those it owes money to.
We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
Agreed! We should intentionaly start a group with the intent to find people who have been wronged to sue companies. Would require lawyers though.
Imagine a not-for-profit that exists only to help victims and exterminate companies?
They did get billed ~$150k and paid for the water. Questions have not been answered about how the two connections were made without the water authority’s knowledge. Seems difficult for a water main to just spontaneously form but maybe, I am not a pipe expert
My father worked for the city’s utilities and he said they could see when an ad break was during a big TV event because everyone was going to the toilet at the same time. They usually knew when someone had a broken pipe in their cellar before the owner did because of the change in pressure at that location.
No way did the city not know where the water was going.
I hadn’t thought of this, but it’s definitely a thing. They’ve been searching for missing pipes here since we got a data center our landlord emails about looking for leaks that don’t exist
This is one of those civilization ending things. Use of food and water in Palestine has been pretty awful.
Public utilities is woke socialism.
they knew, they just dont want to openly admit it, and just use ignorance.
We need to stop being cowards, and actively go after these people. Sue for every little thing, blacklist them, get them fired.
Water uhhhhh finds a way
Indeed this is a excellent comment on multiple levels.
The issue here would only be that it never naturally goes where you want it to 😉.
~$150k and paid for the water
Can someone put that into perspective for me? I also have a hard time figuring how much 30 mil gallons actually is, like how many households for how long etc.
In any case, honest mistake sounds like a blatant lie, but hey, if POTUS does it why shouldn’t they?
People should provide article links.
There is no simple answer to how much that amount of water actually is since different uses have different impacts. E.g. irrigation is fundamentally different from evaporative cooling. And the amount of water consumed by a household directly is miniscule compared to the goods and services that take water to provide.
If you do napkin math you will be outraged.
E.g. lawn irrigation can take up enormous amounts of water, too, with much lower benefit. Asking people to conserve water that way is probably better than shutting down data centers which do in fact render a useful service.
The useful service of taking people’s clothes off online.
Honestly, if I thought that it would help our leaders to shift focus away from the underaged human beings, I’d be more supportive.
I worry that this will work more as an enticement, especially with their love of gambling.
You can do legitimately useful things with computers and ai, even.
You being nasty is your own problem.
According to the EPA, the average American family of four uses about 400 gallons of water per day, or 12,000 gallons per month. This feels high to me, but we’ll use that.
So, 30 million gallons is roughly the monthly usage of 2,500 four-person households, or the daily usage of 75,000 homes.
I feel like they’re adding in water usage to manufacture goods and deliver services. We’re a family of four allotted 2k gal a month for a base rate, over that is charged extra. We’ve never gone over that 2k, and we’re using normally (dishes, laundry, bathing, watering plants, etc).
That definitely feels high, mine is a household of two but I know exactly how much water I use because I’m off grid and I have to go haul it myself from the city my tank on my trailer holds 275 gallons and that’s generally enough to last me anywhere between a week to two weeks depending on how much laundry I need to do.
I shower daily, do dishes all the usual stuff so what the fuck is the average family doing with all that water that they are using more in a day than I do in a week
Not living off grid…?
Looking up the average for New Zealand, I see everything from 250l per family to 275l per person quoted as average.
Much of New Zealand doesn’t meter their water, so all they can do is measure the water put into the system and divide by the number of households/estimated people (minus commercial/industrial use that is metered).
In the area I live in, they are working on putting in meters because they suspect they lose a huge amount of water to leaks on private property that go unnoticed.
I wonder where this water usage figure for the US comes from. Is it measured on meters at their property?
And from what I hear people complain about in memes, I think parts of the US probably use a lot of water for watering lawns, something not that common here because it rains a fair amount.
Edit: lol I was trying to respond to @abcd@feddit.org but 🤷
So that’d be like 200 years of a households usage then, 30 million gallons…?
How does the average American Family manage that consumption?
German family of Four here: We use around 200liter a day. That’s roughly 50gallons. And we do wash ourselves and our clothes.
It’s for sure a lot. Maybe the Epa is counting the water that so many Americans spend watering our trademark huge monoculture lawns so they can stay green regardless of drought/heat wave conditions. Some homes have almost industrial scale sprinkler systems just to accomplish this, although I’m not confident even that would get you up to 400 gallons
400 is a lot for 4-person household. are they taking showers night and morning.
About 50 Olympic size pools. 50m x 25m x 2m
corporations are people until crimes
Your AI surveillance overloads require massive data centers. They also need all of the water and all of the electricity to operate them. Just remember that this is for your own good.
You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Burn it down
Killing the on site generators would be easier… In theory
Accidentally.
Or whatever
Burn the townhall
Where does the water go afterwards, and it’s it usable still?
This was actually used during construction work. This particular data centre is closed loop and won’t use much water at all once it’s built.
From the actual article:
The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation. Once operational, the company said the data centers only will use water for domestic needs, such as bathrooms and kitchens. That will total the equivalent of what four U.S. households use per month, the spokesperson said.
Data centres with evaporative cooling can use huge amounts of water. Whether that’s bad/dangerous depends on the location and the water supply. That does go back into the water cycle, it’s not like fossil fuels where the resource gets destroyed but there are places where data centres are contributing heavily to droughts or water shortages and causing water prices to rise and are dumping hot water into waterways which kills wildlife and encourages things like algal bloom and bacterial growth etc.
Usually that’s in places where there are regulatory failures and underfunded environmental protection. Usually the same places you find mass runoff of agricultural phosphates, PFAS and similar polyflural dumping from chemical plants etc. Where corporations pay their way into regulatory capture.
It’s a real serious issue that’s nuanced. Not every data centre is being built for AI (a huge amount is for video encoding and streaming all these tiktooks, reeliess, tubes and netting flixes) and not every data centre is an ecological disaster. A lot are also building their own solar and batteries because in some places its cheaper long term than paying for the grid. There’s also a bunch building/buying shitty gas or coal plants for the same reason.
The electricity generation can also eat more water because power plants need cooling too. Again, the ecological impact of that is hugely dependent on the location.
Essentially, it’s a big nasty problem that is complex and situational and different in different areas, that is easy to simplify to “AI is destroying all our water!” in order to get quick clicks and outraged interactions.
“Evil AI Data Centre Steals Town’s Water Supply!” Is a much snappier headline that gets shared much farther than “Construction Site Screws Up Their Pipes and Water Meters then Pays Their Water Bill!”
You may trust them.
Very few places recycle the heated water. Warm climates can’t cool it at all. It takes more energy to cool down the warm water so they usually send it down the drain.
I have never heard of the water being reused like this in practice. The majority of datacentres I have seen in Europe have a closed glycol loop and a large air based cooling array (i.e., air handling units), the remainder have adiabatic cooling.
Ah yes, the modern version of polluting rivers.
So maybe, just maybe, they should build the datacenters in cold climates instead.
Or maybe they should do something that doesn’t waste a ton of energy to rip off people’s work and poison the internet.
In order for that to happen, we would need to first abolish capitalism.
